Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson

Meet the artificial intelligent Chef Watson from IBM. He knows more than 10,000 recipes from all over the world and is capable of combining any ingredient while following your personal food preferences.

The idea is simple: go to the website or open the app and put in your desired ingredients, or whatever you have in your fridge. Should you have allergies or traumatizing experience with broccoli, opt it out and it will be excluded from your dish. You can also choose a typical cuisine from a very long list of countries.

Having cooked exactly zero dishes in his life, Chef Watson’s legitimacy comes from a training by human chefs and knowledge on complementary flavors from different chemicals in individual ingredients. So the AI might have a gap here and there when a certain combination is too peculiar, but if you avoid the strangeness of a Vietnamese apple kebab, you might find new classics at the risk of redefining your kitchen with a robotic chef.

This jumps from designer food to AI food, food that is designed by a computer. A new Sunday family ritual might start by asking your AI chef for a special recipe to cook with your children. Chef Watson can potentially change a human chef job as well, with a computer that has over 10,000 recipes at the top of his head as competitor. And it challenges us, of course: what is preparing food for us, a tradition to protect or a tradition to update?